Note 77 — OSCAR BIE (continued 2)

Long before Bach was born, we find an English composer anticipating this comprehensive treatment of the scales. Before 1667, John Jenkins wrote a series of “Fancies” on each degree of the alphabetical scale, three movements to the set. The keys actually used are C, D, E, F, G, A, B flat, all minor except F and B flat. But, as is mentioned in a previous note, in one of the three movements in F, Jenkins modulates nearly through all the flat keys, at any rate as far as D flat, thus showing that already in the middle of the seventeenth century an Englishman contemplated Bach’s accomplished work of using the scale on every semitone. And this by no means fixes the ultimate limit. Bull’s fantasia on Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La—piece number 51 in the Fitzwilliam book—modulates into all the twelve keys. Though this does not prove that instruments were as yet tuned with an equal temperament, it does prove that Bach was in no sense the originator of the idea, and the probability is very great that the system was in practical use in England in Elizabethan times. Bull was flourishing in 1590.